Poloniex Lists Binance Coin Following Tensions Over Steem

Poloniex, a veteran exchange that was recently purchased by a consortium including Tron founder Justin Sun, has launched Binance Coin (BNB) and Binance USD (BUSD) pairings.

As of June 6, BNB and BUSD wallets are now live on the exchange, with markets for the corresponding pairings slated to launch in post-only mode to ensure stability before full trading functionality rolls out.

Binance tokens listed on Poloniex

The listings bring support for six new pairings, with Binance Coin now tradeable against Bitcoin (BTC), Tether (USDT), and Tron (TRX) in addition to BUSD, and Binance USD also supported against USDT and BTC.

BNB currently comprises the eighth-ranked cryptocurrency by capitalization with $2.76 billion. While BUSD ranks as the 49th-largest crypto asset by market cap, it is the third-ranked stablecoin behind Tether and USD Coin.

Are tensions between CZ and Sun subsiding?

The listing appears to indicate that it’s business as usual between Binance and Justin Sun, despite the two camps failing to see eye-to-eye over the recent Steem fiasco.

After Justin Sun purchased roughly 20% of Steem’s supply alongside Steemit Inc, the cryptocurrency’s community moved to execute a hard fork that would freeze the founder’s reward acquired by Sun.

In response, Steem’s block validators were suddenly ousted, with votes corresponding to customer funds stored on Binance, Poloniex, and Huobi being mobilized to remove the delegated proof-of-stake, or DPoS, network’s witnesses.

CZ takes stand against Sun over Steem

Following community backlash, Huobi and Binance founder and chief executive Changpeng Zhao, or CZ, asserted that they had been misled as to the nature of what they were voting for, claiming to have been informed of an upcoming “upgrade.” 

While the exchanges promptly withdrew their votes, the debacle comprised the catalyst for a community-driven hard fork that would create a new chain dubbed Hive — freezing Sun’s controversial founder’s reward in the process.

However, retaliatory Steem hard forks initiated to freeze millions of STEEM tokens held by the network’s former validators again saw Sun’s action draw public criticism from CZ — who took aim at the centralization of Steem and announced that Binance would support additional community-driven forks intended to unfreeze the targeted funds.